Rigor

rigor (noun):

• the quality of being extremely thorough, exhaustive, or accurate;
• severity or strictness;
• demanding, difficult, or extreme conditions.

rigor mortis (noun): 

• stiffening of the joints and muscles of a body a few hours after death, usually lasting from one to four days.

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On the afternoon of election day, November 7th, I skipped out of school and walked through downtown Bangor, Maine, and I cried.

I looked up the stretch of Main Street and walked past open shops, clear intersections, brightly colored buildings and a spacious Market Square. I saw signs for the Yes on 1 campaign strewn everywhere, along with the occasional sign for a City Council candidate or two. I was wondering what this city, this place I have now found myself calling home, would become. It was already a place where I grappled with my own loneliness, my own depression. It was a place where I had embraced my own identity (progressive, somewhat gender-non-conforming, queer) and found my own small niches (chess, lifting). But this place that was suddenly comforting was going to change, and I didn't know if that change would be for better or worse.

It wasn't too long ago that I wanted to leave this place for a greener pasture, and I wasn't even sure if that greener pasture was on the same continent as me. There is green everywhere, but it's easy to see green as scorched earth and move on. I have been doing this to myself my whole life, and maybe I can stop it. But, then again, what if I was right? What if Bangor, Maine, the place I had seen as dreadful and lonely, really was that? Scorched earth?

I took a picture of my beautiful downtown and put it on Instagram. I quoted a Roger Miller song that immortalized the Bangor of the past: the northern terminus of civilization in a logger's world, a paper world, a small world.

I'll spoil the surprise for you on the election: Clare wins. The person who turned my scorched earth into green grass, the person who convinced me this place was worth staying for, was sworn in as a Bangor City Councilor on Monday morning. Another progressive female candidate, Laura Supica, won right along with her, bringing gender into better balance on Bangor's Council in one of those election results that make you glad you voted.

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The current challenge on my plate is this: my school is in a rush to innovate in the face of dropping enrollment (and therefore, revenue). I am scared of innovation, despite having been on the forefront of some truly innovative educational work. Sizer, VLACS, Innovation Academy, Sontag: these are schools and programs where innovation is the norm, but there is a compass for that innovation. These are schools with well-defined missions, with rigid backbones dictating the lens through which decisions are made and the work of educating students is delivered. That work was a different kind of rigor; no year looked the same, and no curriculum achieved precisely the same goals. The safety net for innovation where innovation is expected is unfurled regularly because there is a solid base upon which to fall.

Yet innovation is frightening still. Experimentation on unfamiliar ground is not for the faint of heart. Experimentation requires the real commitment of time, energy, money, emotion, work. And failure is abject. When innovative things fail, they go up in flames.

What's the project? 

My IT director and I are working on a STEM Academy embedded in our school itself. The structure is simple: a morning session for students in higher grades, an afternoon session for the younger students in grades 9 and 10. Instead of a period-based structure with classes that are separated, the schedule would be melted down into bigger blocks of learning time, where interdisciplinary, project-based, modular work in STEM would be completed. The STEM Academy would contain four content themes, where all disciplines would be taught:

• Grade 9: Energy
• Grade 10: Interactions
• Grade 11: Experimentation and Investigation
• Grade 12: Dissemination of Results

Our big struggle is integrating mathematics into the work, which we both agree needs to be taught as stand-alone modules in addition to being weaved into the curriculum.

Furthermore, I've been brainstorming social and work-related outcomes, such as:

• Positive motivation and self-direction (are there positive incentives and advantages to my work? how can I positively engage in work even when it presents challenges or exposes struggles?);
• Meaningful goal setting and reflection (do I know what I need to do today? did I actually do it? what are my next steps?);
• Managing passive and active collaboration (an idea I admit I haven't defined well);
• Leading discourse as a demonstration of mastery.

Having a foot squarely in two different pedagogical worlds (the ideal and the practical, the birds-eye view and the view on the ground, the vision and the logistics, etc.), I went berserk when we solidified plans with our principal and our head of school. I wrote a big stash of structure. I hammered out a proposed schedule and a job description for STEM Academy faculty and a Dean (which my partner-in-crime suggested I be; this thought makes me shudder). I brainstormed a quick template for project planning (a bastardized knockoff of the Understanding by Design work by Wiggins and McTighe, but, hey, some people in my school don't even know about backwards design, so it's okay for now). I wrote a mission statement describing what we mean to achieve.

In other words, I hyperprepared.

This was a defense mechanism, admittedly. I have seen other ideas get shot down or receive damnation by faint praise in our school, largely because they are small, underbaked, underprepared, small changes meant to achieve small gains. They require little work and are therefore underwhelming. They are simple: new classes, new College Board programs, later start times, different structures for interactions with kids. This is not what is being called for. My bosses want the homerun, and I was swinging for it.

They didn't say no. The concerns we laid out before them, which we thought would be funding (whether this would be a net positive, neutral, or net negative), scheduling, transcripts, content, the effect on our AP testing (which earns my school a very high rating in the Washington Post's list of the most challenging high schools in the country), so-called college readiness, access available to all students (even to students with disabilities or checkered histories with the STEM disciplines)...these were not hang-ups. We were even told that there was confidence that we could deliver this successfully to whomever comes in the door.

The issue is space. Where to put this new academy? What rooms?

So, we were given a challenge. A hypothetical STEM Academy in the 2018-2019 school year has fifteen students and one room, with two delivering faculty. What does it look like?

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We haven't quite formulated the solution to this problem, but that's not the point. They didn't say no to our idea, and that feedback was heartening. We were given clearance (if it could be called that) to germinate the idea further, not to consign it to the pedagogical ash heap. It is a huge step for me emotionally because it means there is some green grass poking out of the scorched earth that I see around me. It's something that is worth staying for.

It is crazy how one small victory can feel like a gigantic game-changer. Education is a rollercoaster in this way, but I can't help but feel like the sheer rigor of this work, of inventing and hypothesizing and germinating ideas to represent a reality that might never exist, was present here in ways that the other ideas did not bear.

I worked my ass off, with someone else working his ass off. And the work isn't finished. Back to the drawing board we go.

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In both my school and my city I had begun to feel strictly unwanted. It is hard feeling separate, different, other, and it was getting to me in the summer of 2016. So, on a trip out of town in late August, I thought of a plan to commit suicide. After three hours of contemplation from 1 to 4 AM, I decided that my plan was a good idea in what felt like a calm, rational manner, and that executing said plan with little to no harm to anyone would be simple. I reacted by looking at my Facebook chat and finding a person I could tell.

Subsequently, I spent a little over ten hours in a hospital observation room and roughly two months in therapy. The work of understanding the depression I feel, the mental games that a depressed brain plays, the physical toll it takes on my body and the emotional toll it takes on my soul, was exhausting. Liberating, but exhausting. Despite the support I got, that feeling of inclusion, of being wanted, wasn't there, or so I thought.

This is where my friend Clare comes in. Shannon and I have this strange habit of collecting friends that are so geographically spread out that we might see them a handful of times in a year, but we know and love them like we saw them yesterday. Clare was one of those friends, and we moved to Bangor within a short time of one another. She was a shoulder to cry on when I felt like my little world had crumbled to the ground.

At a watering hole downtown, she implored me to stay. She needed people like me to stay. There was purpose to our being here. It gave me pause to all the plans I had thought of up to that point, which involved relocating to Boston for graduate work at Harvard, or teaching in an urban district like Lawrence or Springfield, or returning to online work full time, or abandoning teaching altogether and doing consultancy work in Boston or New York.

So when she initiated a run for City Council, I did my best to help. I engaged in a canvassing session and donated money and beer (yes, beer...not the best stuff in the world, but still, enough to make for a good kickoff party). I wrote a letter to the editor of the Bangor Daily News talking about why Clare will kick ass on Council. I put up signs in the dead of night with Meredith being my signkeeper, and I put up more after a huge windstorm blew them all clear. Here was this person that had given me a new lease on this place, and I wanted to help. I wanted to give back to that effort.

Clare Davitt won her seat on City Council by sixty votes. And I cannot say enough how grateful I am to her, both for running, and for letting me give back for that small, simple act of generosity.

The rigor she applied to her own work in running for City Council is something I wish to emulate in changing my school for the better. It inspires me to work even harder.

Suddenly, Bangor is looking like a better place to be. My school is looking like a better place to be. But that work is not over. Maybe the places worth being are the places where the work isn't over.